High on my rail-fan bucket list was a visit to Sandaoling. Sandaoling lies in Xinjiang province in North West China and it’s claim to fame is that it is one of the last places operating steam locomotives in an industrial setting. Changes are happening fast at Sandaoling and before the operation is a shadow of it’s former self I decided to pay obeisance ……

here’s a short video………. ( well not so short !)

For an extensive photo gallery click here…..

The road to Sandaoling is a pretty long one from New Delhi. It involved a 5 hour flight to Almaty, Kazhakastan, with a 7 hour wait at the airport, before  a 1 hour flight to Urumqi. A 0300 arrival followed by a 530km, 7 hour car journey finally got me to SanDaoLing. The area is an autonomous region and the ethnic Uyghurs are at loggerheads with the Chinese administration. The recent Kunming knife attack has also been attributed to the Xinjiang Uyghur separatists and so it was with some trepidation that i made my way out of the airport to be met by my guide, Liu Xue Jun. Entire arrangements for this trip was made by John Raby of Linesiding with John.

The open cast pit mine is about 6 km long and 1.5 km wide, reaching a depth of apx. 800ft. Two deep pit mines lie to the north east of the pit. A third deep pit mine lies to the north west and a rail connection to it is currently being constructed. Coal from the open pit and deep pit mines are brought to Nanzhan, where coal is loaded on to China Rail wagons and hauled by diesels to the mainline at Hami and onwards…….

click on pic

Currently the west side of the pit is being mined. The rock is blasted with dynamite and coal is brought up to the blue loader area by trucks……..

and then loaded onto the trains ……

The train consists of 13 self unloading hoppers permanently coupled and hauled by a JS class 2-8-2 locomotive.

The last wagon has a small guard van on it. Atop the guard van is a  semaphore signals which indicates to the loco driver whether to stop or proceed.

the 13 wagon rakes are pushed back into the blue loader it takes about 30 minutes for all the 13 wagons to be loaded .The train then has to make it’s way out of the east pit …….

and then onwards to the washery for unloading the coal ………

Coal is also mined via two deep mines …. the YiJing Mine….

and the ErJing mine …..

The coal trains make their way to NanZhan with the TianShan mountains making a beautiful backdrop ……

Coal is transferred to China Rail at NanZhan…..

and is hauled by diesels to Hami and onwards …..

There is a cement works at NanZhan as well , out of bounds for tourists……..

SanDaoLing has it’s own loco work shop…..

which can perform complete overhauls of the locos ……

DongBoliZhan is where the shift change for the east pit crews, takes place…..

It is also the starting point for the workers trains which runs between DongBoliZhan and XiBoliZhan…..

A diesel rail car with a flatcar from DongBoliZhan, carries water down to the pit for the workers

The west pit is currently being mined……

Before the coal can be carried away by the trucks to the blue loader, the spoil has to be removed by excavators and loaded onto the spoil trains…

which then have to  thrash their way out of the pit.

After performing a switchback maneuver….

they finally make their way out of the pit and onwards to XiBoliZhan…….

XiBoliZhan is the holding yard for the trains coming out of the pit and moving onto the spoil dumping area, and vice versa ……

Trains from the east pit make an appearance to load up on coal ……

It’s a nice spot for sunset and night photography…..

Past XiBoliZhan lie the spoil dumping lines. In it’s prime there were 6 spoil lines but currently there are only 3 operational. the other lines having been ripped out….

A Jordan spreader is stationed at XiBoliZhan for levelling and spreading the spoil once dumped by the trains ….

A lot of changes are occurring at SanDaoLing the most defining being the end of spoil operations in the west pit. The spoil will be removed by trucks starting June 2014 and will be dumped within the west pit itself. This will mean the end of spoil haulage and dumping and evidence of this can be seen by the string of empty hopper wagons stabled outside XiBoliZhan …….

There is a third deep pit mine to the north west of SanDaoLing and currently coal from this mine is hauled by trucks. That is set to change as a new line is being laid west of XiBoliZhan so that trains can haul the coal.  The old worker train route which used to run south of the open pit is also currently being upgraded for this purpose……

Traffic seen on this line will certainly not make up for the traffic lost on the spoil removal and dumping lines which leads one to wonder if the sun is finally setting on the greatest steam show on earth……